Sophia Cope

Sophia Cope

Senior Staff Attorney

Sophia Cope is a Senior Staff Attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's civil liberties team, working on a variety of free speech and privacy issues. She has been a civil liberties attorney for 15 years and has experience in both litigation and policy advocacy. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Slate, and Huffington Post.

Before moving to Washington, Sophia litigated at the First Amendment Project in Oakland, California, where she defended an environmental activist against a frivolous lawsuit and a video journalist against a federal subpoena seeking his unpublished footage; she also counseled clients on how to obtain greater access to public records and public meetings.

Sophia was an adjunct professor of media law for nearly four years, teaching Washington-area undergraduate communication and journalism students. She is a graduate of Santa Clara University and University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She is proud to be a native Californian.

Deeplinks Posts by Sophia

EFF joined a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo opposing a proposal to deploy stronger vetting procedures against Chinese students intending to study in the United States because the procedures would threaten the free speech interests of both Chinese students and their American associates. Reuters...

The Texas Supreme Court upheld protections for anonymous online speakers in a January ruling, albeit in a way that sidestepped thorny legal questions but will likely have the effect of vindicating First Amendment rights going forward. The case, Glassdoor, Inc. v. Andra Group, concerned an effort by...

Earlier this week, we joined with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Article 19, and 10 other international human rights groups in a letter to Google’s senior leadership, calling on the company to come clean on its intentions in China – both to the public, and within the company...

Special thanks to legal intern Miranda Rutherford who was the lead author of this post. If someone sues you for a review you wrote on Yelp, can a court force Yelp to take down the review? This month, the California Supreme Court said “no” in the case Hassell v....

EFF, joined by ACLU, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit arguing that border agents need a probable cause warrant before searching personal electronic devices like cell phones and laptops. We filed our brief in a criminal case involving Donald Wanjiku, who...

The leak investigation involving a Senate staffer and a New York Times reporter raises significant issues about journalists, digital security, and the ability of journalists to protect confidential sources. The New York Times recently revealed that the FBI had been investigating a former aide to the Senate Intelligence...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit got it wrong—again—ruling last week in U.S. v. Touset that border agents may forensically search, without any suspicion of wrongdoing, travelers’ electronic devices. The Eleventh Circuit ruled in March in U.S. v. Vergara that neither a warrant...

Government searches of cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices without a warrant when we cross the U.S. border may violate the First and Fourth Amendments, according to a powerful ruling by a federal court last week in a civil rights lawsuit brought by EFF and the ACLU. It...

In a victory for privacy rights at the border, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit today ruled that forensic searches of electronic devices carried out by border agents without any suspicion that the traveler has committed a crime violate the U.S. Constitution. The ruling in U.S....

The State Department has alarmingly declared that it wants to collect social media information from all visa applicants. This appears to be an expansion of a 2017 program that sought social media information only from a subset of initially suspicious visa applicants. This is also the latest effort in a...